Welcome,
our noble viewers, to
Science and Spirituality.
Today, we have
the unique opportunity to
explore a particular view
on how life in the
Universe developed
with one of the world’s
most innovative and
progressive biologists,
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake
of Britain.
He is best known for his
theory of morphic fields
and resonance, which
describes the unfolding,
emergence, and evolution
of the Universe.

Dr. Sheldrake
studied biochemistry and
other natural sciences
at Cambridge University
in England
and philosophy
at Harvard University
in the United States,
before returning
to Cambridge for a PhD
in biochemistry.
Currently
he is the director of the
Perrott-Warrick project,
which is administered
by Trinity College
in Cambridge, England.
The project’s purpose
is to research
unexplained human
and animal abilities.

He is the author of more
than 75 scientific papers
and ten books,
with some of the
most renowned being
“A New Science of Life:
The Hypothesis
of Formative Causation,”
“Dogs that Know
When Their Owners
are Coming Home,” and
“Other Unexplained
Powers of Animals.”
What exactly is meant
by the term
by “morphic resonance?”
Our Supreme Master
Television correspondent
asked Dr. Sheldrake
himself about the concept:

Morphic resonance
is a kind of memory
principle in nature;
anything similar in
a self-organizing system
will be influenced by
anything that’s happened
in the past, and
anything in the future
that happens
in a similar system
will be influenced
by what happens now.
So it’s a memory
in nature
based on similarity,
and it applies to atoms,
molecules, crystals;
living organisms, brains,
societies and indeed
to planets and galaxies.
So it’s
a principle of memory
and habit in nature.

And animals
and plants also?

Oh yes,
animals and plants.
In fact, Charles Darwin
was convinced
that animals and plants
were essentially habits,
and one person who has
commented on his work,
Francis Huxley, said
that he could just as well
have called his book
“The Origin of Habits”
instead of
“The Origin of Species.”
Because for him,
organisms are habits.

To provide
further insight into
Dr. Sheldrake’s ideas,
we now present excerpts
from the lecture entitled
“Morphic Resonance,
Collective Memory
and Habits of Nature,”
by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake,
presented
at Goldsmiths College
in London, UK,
on January 20, 2009.

The idea
of morphic resonance
has huge numbers
of implications and
their all rather shocking
from the conventional
scientific point of view.
The first and biggest
of them is that the
so-called laws of nature
may be more like habits;
they are not all fixed.
They can evolve.
One of the implications
of this is that all species,
including humans, draw
on the collective memory.
Each individual draws
on the collective memory
and contributes to it.

Another implication is
that ordinary memory
works by
morphic resonance,
they are not stored
in your brain.
Your brain is more like
a receiver that tunes into
memories across time.
I am hoping to show that
these are scientific ideas
that lead to
a completely new way
of looking at nature.

The idea that the
laws of nature are fixed
is a very old idea.
It goes back
to ancient Greece.
In the 17th century,
the founding fathers
of modern science
Kepler, Galileo,
Copernicus, Newton, all
believed that that science
was in the business
of finding out
the eternal mathematical
laws of nature,
which were ideas
in the mind of God.
They were
beyond space and time.
They were not material
because they were part
of the Divine Nature.

In the 18th century and
the early 19th century,
with the growth of
atheism and materialism,
the laws of nature
remained there
like the ghost
of the mind of the God
of the world machine;
changeless
mathematical laws which
determine everything
that happens.
There was this idea
that history was moving
towards a goal
and that gives the idea
of progress
-- progress literally means
moving forwards.

These progressivist
movements were confined
to the human realm
until the middle
of the 19th century.
With Charles Darwin’s,
“Origin of Species,”
an evolutionary vision
in 1859, 150 years ago,
was extended
to the whole of life.
Darwin hardly used
the word evolution;
he usually used the word
progress.
And so it was really
an extension of the idea
of human progress
to all of life.
But it stopped there.
For most physicists,
the idea that
the whole Universe
was progressing
seemed absurd.

At that time,
physics was in the grip
of the Second Law
of Thermodynamics
as a dominant idea,
which said in fact
the opposite of progress
was happening;
the Universe
was running down
towards a final heat death,
when it would
freeze up forever.

We will bring you
more excerpts of
Dr. Sheldrake’s lecture
right after
these short messages.
You are watching
Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to
Science and Spirituality.
We are exploring
morphic fields
and resonance,
an idea introduced
by the British biologist
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.
The idea theorizes
that nature has
a collective memory,
which influences
subsequent things
on the basis
of similarity of forms.

If Dr. Sheldrake
is correct, this means
that the so- called
“laws of nature”
are not fixed and that our
memory is not localized
in our brain.
We now provide
further portions
of a lecture entitled
“Morphic Resonance,
Collective Memory
and Habits of Nature,”
by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake
presented
at Goldsmiths College
in London, UK,
on January 20, 2009.
Here, Dr. Sheldrake
continues his description
of how the ability
of the laws of nature
to change, has been
perceived over time.

So, it really was
only in biology that
this evolutionary vision
got going, until 1966,
when it took over physics
as well.
The Big Bang cosmology
tells us that the Universe
began very small,
less than the size of the
head of the pin, very hot
and it has been growing,
cooling and evolving
ever since.
Now, all of nature
is evolutionary.
This vision,
originally religious,
then secular and social,
then biological,
is now cosmic.
So we have
cosmic evolution.

Now, what about
the eternal laws of nature
in an evolving Universe?
Most scientists
believe in the
eternal laws of nature,
not because they
have thought about it,
but because they haven’t.
This is where I think
real skepticism comes in.
Deep skepticism is to ask
questions about things
that most people
just take for granted.
These all share the idea
the laws of nature
don’t change.

But if the Universe
is evolving, why cannot
the laws of nature
evolve too?
As soon as
you ask that question,
you realize that the very
idea of the laws of nature
is questionable.
If by law we
simply mean regularities
as discovered by science,
then since the Universe
has evolved,
the regularities in it
have evolved too.
And so we immediately
arrive at the idea of
evolving laws of nature.

It makes a huge difference
to the way we interpret
natural phenomena.
For phenomena
that have been around
for a long time,
like most of the things
physicists study –
hydrogen atoms,
for example,
the formation of stars,
salt crystals –
these kinds of things
have been around
for millions or billions
of years.
If they have habits,
the habits are now
so fixed that you wouldn’t
notice any change.

They behave as
if they are governed
by fixed laws.
Where the difference
shows up is when you
look at new phenomena,
phenomena that have
never happened before
in the history
of the Universe, and
there we should be able
to see the habits build up.
Now, it so turns out
that you can actually
study this in chemistry.

What do chemists
actually find?
They find
that new compounds are
very hard to crystallize
and as time goes on
they get easier and easier
all around the world.
Sometimes
there are compounds
that aren’t known
in a crystalline form at all
for years and then
once they’ve appeared,
they start showing up
everywhere.
This happened
in the drug industry.

It’s happened several times,
when what are called
allomorphs,
different forms
of crystals, of drugs,
one of them in the
AZT AIDS formulation.
Suddenly,
deviant crystals started
showing up in a factory
and soon
they were everywhere
and they couldn’t get
the original ones again.
Suddenly it was
like an infection;
they had taken over –
another form of the crystal.

If the organizing habit of
the crystal gets stronger,
as time goes on,
even a fully crystallized
substance should
have a stronger habit.
It should be harder
to break it up.
To break up crystals,
what you do is
heat them up.
They reach a point where
the thermal vibration
destroys
the crystal structure.
That is called
the melting point.
Everybody knows that
the melting point of water
is 0º Centigrade.
If newly
crystallized substances
become more stable,
this theory will predict
the melting point
should rise.

It took me a long time
to pluck up courage
to ask a chemist,
“Have you ever noticed
whether melting points
of new compounds go up?
To my surprise, he said,
“Oh yes, it’s quite
a common observation.
I’ve often found it myself.
It’s quite easy
to explain.”
He said, “There’s
no mystery here,
and certainly
no morphic resonance.”
He said,
“What’s going on
is simply that
when you get better
at making a compound,
you get purer samples.”
Impurities lower
the melting point.
So, as we get better
at making things,
they get purer, and so
the melting points go up.

But, I decided to try and
take it further by looking
at historical records.
This compound is salicin
and these are
the melting points in
1932, 1902, 1940
and 1994.
Salicin occurs
in willow bark.
It’s a natural compound;
no change in melting point
over the 20th century.

Aspirin is a synthetic
derivative based on that,
first synthesized
in the 19th century.
In 1914, middle
of the 20th century, 1994,
it went up
in melting point
by about 14 0Centigrade.
We’re not talking here
of fractions of a degree,
we’re talking big effects.

Well, this principle of
memory in nature is what
I call morphic resonance.
The idea is that
similar things influence
subsequent similar things,
on the basis of similarity.
They tend to make
the same kinds of things
happen again.
So similarity is
the principle,
and resonance is
the movement across
time of information
about patterns
of vibratory activity.
So that any pattern
of vibratory activity,
which all atoms,
molecules, crystals, cells,
organisms have –
they’re all oscillatory
or vibratory –
resonate with those
that have gone before
across space and time.

It doesn’t fall off
with space and time.
It doesn’t involve
a transfer of energy
but of information.
That’s the postulate,
right or wrong.
That’s what
I’m suggesting.
And I’m further suggesting
that in biological systems
and in chemical systems,
the pattern of things
is organized by what
I call morphic fields.

Next week on
Science and Spirituality,
Dr. Sheldrake will
share more evidence on
the existence of morphic
fields and resonance.
Please join us then.
Thank you,
inquisitive viewers, for
your company today on
Science and Spirituality.
Coming up next is
Words of Wisdom, right
after Noteworthy News.
May you have
a wonderful week ahead.

Welcome to
Science and Spirituality.
On today’s episode,
we continue a lecture
on the topic of
morphic resonance with
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake,
a British developmental
biologist and biochemist.

Currently
he is the director of the
Perrott-Warrick project,
which is administered
by Trinity College
in Cambridge, England.
The project’s purpose
is to research
unexplained human
and animal abilities.
He is the author of more
than 75 scientific papers
and ten books,
with some of the
most renowned being
“A New Science of Life:
The Hypothesis
of Formative Causation,”
“Dogs that Know
When Their Owners
are Coming Home,” and
“Other Unexplained
Powers of Animals.”

According to
Dr. Sheldrake,
every being draws
from morphic fields,
which he understands
as the collective memory
of nature.
They are like
a set of blueprints
of all possible forms,
which over time
add to each other.
The morphic fields
do not diminish with
time and space, because
they carry no energy,
just information alone.

This theory intersects
with many concepts
found in spirituality,
thus our Supreme Master
Television correspondent
asked Dr. Sheldrake
about this fascinating
crossing point.

The kind of science that
we have at the moment,
a very materialistic
science, creates
a very sharp barrier
against spirituality
because it’s really
saying that the mind
is nothing
but the brain and it’s
all just inside the head.
But with morphic fields
and morphic resonance,
there are more areas of
discourse with spirituality.
It means that the
ancestors, the people
who have gone before,
influence us in the present,
not just through genes
but through
morphic resonance.

So it means in one way
that there is an influence
from the past, and
all spiritual traditions
accept that there’s
an influence from those
who have gone before.
Also that
we can influence those
who come afterwards,
not just through ordinary
cultural transmission, but
in a more invisible way.
That’s one aspect.
Another is that
what you do, what you say
and what you think can
influence other people
by morphic resonance.
So we’re more
responsible
for our actions and
words and thoughts
on this principle than
we would otherwise be.

There is no moral filter
in morphic resonance,
which means
that we have to be
more careful about
what we are thinking
if we are concerned
about the effect
that we have on others.

To provide
further insight into
Dr. Sheldrake’s ideas,
we now present excerpts
from the lecture entitled
“Morphic Resonance,
Collective Memory
and Habits of Nature,”
by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake,
presented
at Goldsmiths College
in London, UK,
on January 20, 2009.

First of all, fields.
Fields were first
introduced into science
by Michael Faraday
in London.
And the idea was
that there are regions
of influence in space
outside material objects.
Here is a magnetic field,
you’ve all seen this many
times before, but there is
a region of influence
that extends beyond
the material surface.
Fields are
not made of matter.
They extend beyond matter,
and indeed
in modern physics,
matter is now thought to
be made of fields, energy
bound within fields.

Now, in embryology,
a number of
embryologists came up
with the idea that embryos
are shaped by fields.
Why is it that
the arm and the leg have
different shapes when
they have the same DNA
and the same proteins?
It is like buildings with
different architectural
plans. (They proposed)
that there were fields
shaping developing
organisms called
morphogenetic fields.
“Morphe” form, “genesis”
coming into being.
This is a bat embryo,
and it is just
to remind you of what
embryos look like.

And the way
that these fields, which
I call morphic fields
as the general word
for them, which
includes morphogenetic
and other forms of fields,
they’re organized
in nested hierarchies.
The field of the whole bat,
like the outer circle,
these would be
the fields of the organs,
like the limbs or the eyes,
these are the tissues within
and these are the cells
within those.
All of nature
is in fact organized
in this nested hierarchy.
These could be subatomic
particles in atoms,
in molecules, in crystals.
These could be organisms
in a society of organisms,
like a flock of birds.

The larger field
could represent this
larger organized unit.
At every level,
the whole is more
than sum of the parts.
And the question is,
“What is this
mysterious wholeness?”
Well, I’m suggesting
it’s the morphic fields of
each system, which have
an inbuilt memory given
by morphic resonance.
Morphic resonance
automatically averages
what’s happened before,
and to get an idea
of how it might work,
this is an analogy.

These are
average scientists.
An average female
and an average
male scientist at
the John Innes Research
Institute in Norwich,
made by superimposing
photographs.
They’re composite photos,
and what you get
is a kind of
probability structure
of a face.

It’s a probability
structure very like
the probability structures
in quantum physics.
Morphogenetic fields
where introduced into
biology for two reasons.
Firstly, to understand
what it is that shapes
the form of organisms,
which is
impossible to understand
just in terms of
genes and gene products,
because they don’t have
any particular form.
Even if you switch on
genes in the right place
in your arm or your leg,
making the right proteins
does not give you
an arm or a leg.
Something else
is shaping them.
That is one reason.

The other is that
fields have an automatic
holistic property;
you can’t have
a part of a field.
If you cut a magnet
in half, you don’t get
one North Pole
and one South Pole,
you get two smaller
magnets each
with a complete field.
The same
applies to behavior,
and here we’re getting
closer to psychology.
This theory says
that the organization
of the nervous system
is also organized
by morphic fields,
and this should apply
to learning.

We will bring you
more excerpts
of Dr. Sheldrake’s lecture
right after
these short messages.
You are watching
Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to
Science and Spirituality.
We are exploring
morphic fields
and resonance,
an idea introduced
by the British biologist
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.
The idea theorizes
that nature has
a collective memory,
which influences
subsequent things
on the basis
of similarity of forms.
If Dr. Sheldrake
is correct, this means
that the so- called
“laws of nature”
are not fixed and that our
memory is not localized
in our brain.

We now provide
further portions
of a lecture entitled
“Morphic Resonance,
Collective Memory
and Habits of Nature,”
by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake
presented
at Goldsmiths College
in London, UK,
on January 20, 2009.
Here, Dr. Sheldrake
describes how learning
is influenced
by morphic fields.

There are a lot of ways
in which you can
test morphic resonance
in the human realm.
There are
areas of existing data
where we can look
at the possible effects
of morphic resonance,
and one is with IQ tests.
This is one
of the very few areas
where the same tests
have been done
year after year.

I would predict that the
average score in IQ tests
should be
going up year by year,
not because people
are getting smarter, but
because so many people
have already
done the test, they’re
getting easier to do
by morphic resonance.

When I first predicted this
in the 1980’s,
I couldn’t get my hands
on IQ test data
and I didn’t know
how to test this.
I was therefore fascinated
when it turned out
that a psychologist
called James Flynn
looked at data
from Japan and America
to start with, and then
in many other countries,
and found what is now
called, “the Flynn effect,”
which shows a
large increase in average
IQ test scores over
the twentieth century.

This is from 1918-1989;
this is a big effect.
It’s been found in many
other countries as well.
It’s not because people
are getting smarter.
What’s going on?
There’s been a huge debate
among psychologists
to try and explain this;
there are no
satisfactory explanations
that satisfy everyone,
Flynn himself
has confessed
to be baffled by it.
But it’s just what
you’d expect on the basis
of morphic resonance.

In psychology,
Jung among others
has proposed that all
human beings draw upon
a collective memory.
And morphic resonance
would mean that if the
idea didn’t already exist,
you’d have to invent it.
The greatest
collective memory would
come from those who
are most similar to you
in the past,
members of your family
or people of similar
cultural background,
because this would apply
to the transmission
of cultural forms.

Finally,
if I ask the question,
“Which organism
in the past is most similar
to you now?”
The answer
is going to be yourself.
You’re more similar
to yourself in the past
than to anybody else;
therefore the most specific
morphic resonance
working on you
from the past would be
from your own past.
That means
that you’ll have a kind of
memory system based
on morphic resonance
that doesn’t depend
on storing the memories
inside the body.
If you get into
a similar state to one
you’ve been in before,
you’ll resonate with
yourself from the past by
morphic resonance and
pick up those memories.

That, I think,
is how memory works.
Everybody here has been
brought up to believe
that memories are stored
inside the brain,
in modified synapses
or DNA or RNA or
phosphorylated proteins.
There’s
many, many theories
of memory storage.
But one of
the most interesting facts
about memory research
is how unsuccessful
it’s been.

For more than 100 years,
people have tried to find
memories in the brain.
They’ve tried desperately
hard; billions of dollars
have been spent
on this attempt.
Vast numbers of people
have spent their careers
trying to do it.
And of course they’ve
found some interesting
and important things
about memory.
But the attempt
to find the memory traces
has been frustrated
over and over again.
They’ve proved elusive;
they’ve never been able
to pin them down.

I’m a skeptic of
standard memory theories
and I think
given that they’ve had
such a poor track record
in explaining
the phenomenon
for more than 100 years,
it’s worth trying
an alternative approach.
Now there are
some people who’d say
“No, we should never try
alternative approaches
because they must be
stored in the brain.
Everybody knows they’ve
got to be stored in there.”
That’s a paradigmatic
assumption.
That’s just the kind
of thing we should be
skeptical about.
So I’m saying
it’s an open question.

Finally, this view
of habits of nature,
which has so many
implications for
so many branches
of science, doesn’t
explain evolution by itself.
It explains
how things get repeated.
Evolution
has to be an interplay
of habit and creativity,
just like our own lives
are an interplay
of habit and creativity.

If we just had creativity
nothing would
ever stabilize.
If we just had habit
nothing new
would ever happen.
I think morphic resonance
helps explain
the question of habit;
it leaves the source
of creativity open.

But it does give a
completely different view
of the entire evolutionary
process, one which
is more naturalistic
than the conventional
scientific theory
with these mysterious
laws of nature
beyond space and time.
This is more naturalistic
and more radically
evolutionary.
Whether it’s right or not,
time will tell.

We appreciate
Dr. Sheldrake’s
unique perspectives
and innovative thinking,
which provides a very
fascinating explanation
of the evolution
of life and the Universe
through the idea
of morphic resonance.
We wish him much
success in his further
exploration of this area
as we enter
into a new age of
scientific understanding.
Thank you for
your company today on
Science and Spirituality.
Coming up next is
Words of Wisdom,
after Noteworthy News.
May you have
a blessed week ahead.